Patrick McKendry

Happy New Year! For many people, the new year spells a new opportunity to become better. Around the world, millions of people define resolutions for themselves for the next 12 months - goals for health, wealth, social connection, and more.

And, we should! Not only is it good to strive for personal growth, January 1st is a great mental marker to motivate us to tackle an improvement challenge. Research from Dai, Milkman, and Riis out of The Wharton School highlighted the value of the “fresh start effect”. They found that “these landmarks demarcate the passage of time, creating many new mental accounting periods each year, which relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors”.¹ The team measured the effects using search volume trends for diets, attendance at the university gym, and counts of new contract set-ups on stickk.com - an online behavior change and accountability tool. Further, the benefits of a fresh start were not limited exclusively to the new year. The research team found the effects associated with the start of new months and weeks. Truly, you can get these effects from any “temporal landmark” that you define - maybe the next hole in a round of golf or the end of a scheduled 2-hour deep work session.

However, there is an arguably critical flaw in this study. The researchers only measured changes in start behavior - the likelihood of someone to begin a resolution. It has no indication of how successful individuals were in completing their goals when they were initiated in tandem with the fresh start effect. More broadly, studies suggest that 80% of new year’s resolutions fail² with nearly 25% of people quitting after the first week³. Strava, the fitness tracking app, even coins the second Friday of January as Quitter’s Day because of the consistently large usage drop-off they see at that point in the year⁴. Many people are motivated on January 1st, but motivation is cheap and it does not last.

The fresh start effect is not an effective driver of real change, whether that be after the new year or after other temporal landmarks - landmarks such as annual performance reviews. There are numerous parallels here - the annual cadence, the inward reflection on ways to be better, the commitment to new and improved behaviors, and the motivation to start on a new trajectory. In my experience, you tend to get people’s absolute best in the two weeks post reviews. They are encouraged to act on their strengths and motivated to prove that you were wrong about their opportunities. But it does not last. Behavior change is hard and that unstructured motivation fades.

Around this time of year, many companies are coming out of or going into their review process. Give your team - and yourself - the tools to drive lasting behavior change and achieve your goals. For me, that tool is an individual development plan or IDP. Let me walk you through the general structure and why I find it works.

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We DON’T Remember

This is not too big of a problem for the new year when our resolution is to “eat healthier”. But for annual reviews, we often get robust feedback with a paragraph explanation of each opportunity and a list of examples for when we fell short. It can not be easily memorized and can be hard to keep always top-of-mind.

Melinda Gates chooses to use a word of the year, rather than resolutions⁵. For her, it becomes like a mantra to quickly call on when she needs to get her mindset re-oriented. And the word is singular in its focus, not trying to solve all problems all at once. Past words have included “gentle”, “grace”, and “spacious”.

This idea works well in an IDP too. When creating a plan, I coach teammates to select one, maybe two, themes on which to focus. For each theme, they should summarize first into a few words that they can easily keep top of mind. The ability to keep consistent awareness to areas of opportunity is important because, while we will define proactive activities to develop the new skill, we also want to be able to react to unplanned work with the proper response.

As an example, let me share a personal resolution that can also read like an annual review opportunity. I enjoy professional coaching but typically limit my scope by waiting to be asked for guidance and by operating in largely one-to-one situations. To improve on this, my IDP theme for this year is More Async. Thematically, this quickly captures most of the key points. Asynchronous communication, such as this post, moves coaching beyond the one-to-one paradigm and helps me to expand scope. The push for “more” forces an active pursuit. This can easily be kept top of mind across professional encounters. But, it lacks precision.

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We DON’T Plan Ahead

Once we have a theme, we need to add definition for what success looks like. A goal to eat healthier is good but it provides no guidance on what “healthier” means. We can add precision with clarifying statements like “Fast food no more than once per week”, “Eat a salad for a meal at least four times per week”, and “Have a fruit or vegetable with 75% of meals”. Each of these is incomplete on its own, but they bundle together to achieve our thematic resolution.

In an IDP, I call these behavioral tactics. I recommend four to five at a time for each theme and they should be small and attainable. The goal for these is to build momentum towards establishing your new behavior, so do not be afraid to start small. If you have never eaten a salad in your life, start with the tactic of “Have one salad every week.” An IDP should be a living document because you should be consistently improving. The way I use these, you revisit the tactics every month to see if the difficulty should be increased or swapped out for something completely different. You should know that it is time for an update when the tactic has become largely second nature.

Some people will struggle defining these at the start, particularly for building soft skills like communicating confidently. To help, I ask the simple question of “Who is someone that you think does this well and what do they do that makes you think that?” This creates a concrete model off of which the teammate can build. They might say, “I think Joseph is really good at this because he always shares his perspective, even if he disagrees with the rest of the team.” That is good. Turn that example into a tactic like “Proactively speak up twice per week in team meetings to give your opinion.”

I will also call out that I believe behavioral tactics should be recurring activities, rather than goals to achieve. The purpose here is to change behavior which requires habit building. Habit building requires consistent delivery. Goal setting has its place, but it should not be in an IDP.

For my personal example, my behavioral tactics include

Share a coaching post to LinkedIn once per week
Spend 30 minutes daily on writing to document ideas and lessons
Spend 2 hours per week on L&D for professional coach certifications
Spend 30 minutes per week building templates for tools, like the IDP

Note that the tactics do not include actions like “Create a Medium.com account.” While a productive step, it is a one-time action rather than a way to develop behaviors.

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We DON’T Track

Measure what matters. Too many resolutions and pieces of review feedback fail because we do not track attainment against the new behavior. Measuring progress consistently keeps the feedback top-of-mind, which makes you more likely to remember to do it. It can also be a reward mechanism as you can give yourself some praise for doing the activity. For example, if your behavioral tactic is to eat four salads a week, then noting each of those times in a notebook can give you a small dopamine hit whenever you have a salad. It can also bring that and other behavioral tactics back to the top of your mind as you check off the item.

Also importantly, when we track wins we create evidence for ourselves that we can be - or already are - the person that we are striving to be. When you track a time that you ate a salad, you are noting that you are a person who eats salads. And a person who eats salads is someone who eats healthy foods. Ipso facto, you are someone who eats healthy foods. This might sound trivial but the identity you prescribe to yourself is very important in driving behavior change. I refer to this aspect of the IDP as building case studies.

Managers also play a supremely important role in maintaining momentum at this stage. Just as your teammate is watching and tracking their progress, you should reinforce that by highlighting when you notice them displaying the new behavior as well. I have seen numerous cases where managers are actually detrimental to the process because they continue to reinforce the critical feedback that has already been delivered during the review. The intention is good. They want to set and maintain a high performance bar and make sure that all aspects of the improvement area are top of mind. The outcome is bad. This crushes momentum, reminding the person “Hey, remember that you are not a confident communicator. That’s why we’re focusing on this.”

As a manager, take that spirit and reformat it. Highlight the good actions and celebrate the progress that is being made. Use it as a chance to call out not just the good delivery of the behavioral tactics but also how effective your teammate is at self-development as a process. Then, challenge them to push themselves even further because of how well they are already progressing. You can be a cheerleader while also maintaining rigorous expectations.

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We DON’T Share Them

People are fairly open about their new year’s resolutions. Just ask them. This is good because research from the American Society of Training and Development found that when people share goals with a partner to help maintain accountability, they have a 65% chance of successfully achieving that goal⁶. Of course, you must pick someone you can trust who is also invested in your success and with whom you can be honest about progress. But if you can find that partner, it makes a big difference.

However, when it comes to an annual review, people often do not share their improvement plans with their manager. A manager should be someone who is invested in your growth, someone you can meet with regularly to discuss progress, and someone who is able to have direct conversations with you about that progress. Because of the review, the conversation has already started and the evidence clearly supports the value to the teammate in having this conversation. As a follow-up to the annual review, schedule time to talk about the intended growth plan that was built as a result of the review feedback. If you are the manager, help shepherd the conversation along by encouraging it from your team.

There is also an additional reason that I recommend managers review an IDP before signing off on it. Simply put, communicating with clarity and setting expectations is hard. Managers may intend for feedback to be interpreted a certain way and have a clear idea of proper execution. That does not mean that it is interpreted by their teammate in exactly that way. By reviewing an IDP with the manager, you can leverage the concept of “say it back to me”. The teammate says what they interpreted from the review and how they plan to execute on the feedback, and this gives the manager a chance to clarify any misinterpretations and confirm accuracy before anything gets started. This is an easy and effective way to ensure alignment, yet it so often gets missed.

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Annual Reviews are an important tool in every manager’s tool belt. Just like the new calendar year, they are a good opportunity to stop, reflect, and reset on what is working well and where focused improvement will be the most high leverage. But Annual Reviews are not a comprehensive solution to talent management and individual development. They need to be complemented with deliberately defined development plans. Narrow your focus to keep key growth topics top-of-mind. Define and iterate through momentum building wins with behavioral tactics. Track your progress by noting case studies of success. And be collaborative in planning with your manager. Whatever your professional development goal, I hope that you can use the IDP to help you to get there. And for a new year’s resolution, why not go with “Build an IDP”?

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May your best moments of 2022 be your worst moments of 2023. Happy New Year!

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About

My name is Patrick McKendry and I’m a people-first leader at RVO Health. I write about topics pertaining to leadership, management, organizational psychology, and team development with a focus towards kind and active leadership and talent coaching. As Senior Director of Digital Performance Marketing, I work with my team at RVO Health to bring the value of our digital health platform to consumers through digital channels. Every day we strive to do better work and be better teammates.

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Why New Year's Resolutions and Annual Reviews DON'T Work